Counter Factual: Mussolini Doesn’t Roll the Dice June 22, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Hitler tried to persuade Italy to join Germany in 1939. He failed but German arms did their own devilish work in Poland then in France. By late May 1940, when it was clear that France and Britain were on the edge of defeat, Mussolini made increasingly belligerent sounds. It was then Hitler who held the Duce back, until 10 June when Italy plunged its knife into the back of France. From June through to early August Italy had some very modest successes and gained some acres of desert in Egypt and some palm trees in Somalia. After that, though, everything that could possibly went wrong, went wrong. Italy experienced disaster after disaster and her army was confirmed as the worst of the major powers: her navy and airforce and intelligence services had redeeming features, but not enough to salvage the country. Beach’s counterfactual is simple and was inspired by a student. What would have happened had Italy chosen not to fight in June 1940: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com Mussolini knew full well that he was taking a gamble, particularly as it emerged that the British Expeditionary Force had got away. What would have happened had Mussolini decided not to roll the dice?
The first thing to say is that this would have been, paradoxically, to Germany’s benefit. Germany would not have had to concern itself with the Mediterranean or ferrying troops across to North Africa. It would have had a sealed southern border with a friendly neutral across the Alps: it would not have had to waste tens of thousands of men defending a peninsula that would have been better left well alone. That friendly neutral would have traded with Germany (think Holland in the First World War) and swapped intelligence secrets: we might even imagine a situation where Mussolini declared war on the Soviet Union, as his chief ideological enemy, but not the western democracies (compare with Franco’s Spain). It is true that the British would have had free run – save just possibly for some for far-sailing uboats – in the Mediterranean: they could have scaled back their presence there. But the threat of Italy declaring war at some future date would have pinned the British down until after Stalingrad: and really more soldiers in Britain or more ships on the Atlantic seaways would have made little difference to the Germans. It is possible that Mussolini might have been bullied into declaring war on Germany in the closing days of the war, but by then who would have cared? And if he hadn’t (and possibly if he had) imagine the rat run of Nazis into the Alto Adige…
As to Italy Mussolini’s fascist experiment was, by his own testimony, failing: the best explanation behind his appalling racial laws in 1938, a limp-wristed attempt to emulate ghastly Nazidom. Had he remained neutral Italy would have suffered in the early phases of the war as supplies became scarce. Mussolini could though have consolidated his hold on northern Africa and Ethiopia, on Albania and some of the Mediterranean islands. He may or may not have betrayed Hitler: Mussolini always had far less affection for Hitler than Hitler had had for him. But as he saw the iron dream turn rusty, he would have left his Nazi affectations (e.g. anti-semitic legislation) behind: and slowly have turned into just another military dictator. From pontificating superman he would have become a bargain store Franco. Perhaps the comparison with Spain is the best one. At the end of the war, always assuming Mussolini had not been tempted in on the Allies side, he would have been an international outcast. But money is money, trade is trade, and as the Berlin airlift began he would have been recognized as a pillar of the western alliance against Stalin. Fascist Italy could easily have lasted into the 1960s or 1970s: and it is difficult to believe that its transition, when democracy eventually arrived, would have been as painless as Spain’s.
24 June 2015: Chris S kindly writes in to ask if ‘roles the dice’ was a witty bit of fun. No sorry, Beach, has these cognitive black outs… Title corrected
29 June 2015: Stephen D: I think that to speculate as to what would have happened if Mussolini had stayed neutral in 1940, we must make three other assumptions that keep the number of possibilities within reasonable bounds.
1) Since M has the sense to stay neutral in summer 1940 when German victory seems in sight, he also has the sense to refrain from invading Greece and from declaring war on the USSR. He might go as far as Franco did, allowing Italian volunteers to serve on the Eastern front, but staying officially neutral. (I don’t think your suggestion of his declaring war on the USSR but not on the Western powers would keep the latter from attacking Italy. The Finns got away with something similar, but geography made it impossible for theWesterners to get at Finland.)
2) Barbarossa goes ahead pretty much as in reality. This is extremely likely.
3) Likewise, the Japanese war in China leads to them attacking US, British and Dutch possessions, much as they did, and for the same reasons. Hitler then responds, in his characteristic fashion, by declaring war on the US and forcing them out of neutrality. (Really, his best responsewould have been to declare Germany’s full support for the white races in their struggle against treacherous Asiatics, to assure the US that they could commit their full strength to the Pacific, and to order an immediate cessation to all German offensive action in the West and request an armistice with the UK. Of course, to do that would mean he wasn’t Hitler. But I digress.)
All these things being so, we can analyse the probable effects in different geographical areas.
Eastern Mediterranean and thereabouts. No campaigns in Libya, East Africa, Greece or Crete: therefore no need for Britain to commit more than precautionary forces. These should be enough to deal with troubles from the Vichy French in Lebanon and Syria, and with Rashid Ali’s rebellion in Iraq: assuming that these actually happen at all, with no prospect of help from any German base nearer than Marseilles. (It is not always appreciated that, as it happened, German advanced forces coming in via Syria got as far as Mosul.)
Further east. Without the Mediterranean distractions, there are significant numbers of British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops who can be deployed elsewhere, plus many aircraft and ships. The obvious place to put them is Malaya, if the Japanese threat is perceived in time. Would they be enough to prevent the Malayan debacle?
Possibly: made more possible by one specific factor. The fifteen large fleet submarines of the O, P and R classes had been designed for long-range operations in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. After Italy’s entry into the war, they were sent to the Mediterranean for which they were quite unsuited, being too large and unmanoeuverable to survive the rather good Italian antisubmarine effort. Eleven of the fifteen were soon sunk. With Italy, they could be based in Singapore as intended, and their effects on Japanese transports might have been drastic (Japanese antisubmarine efforts were not at all good). If Malaya and Singapore are not lost, the long-term political effects might be considerable.
Western Mediterranean. Very different. Torch, the US/UK invasion of Morocco and Algeria, started in November 1942, with a subsequent advance into Tunisia. There were two main agreed objectives: to attack in the rear of the German/Italian army in Libya, which was in considerable difficulty; and to obtain Tunisia as a base for a subsequent attack on Sicily, which would allow east-west traffic to go through the Mediterranean rather than round South Africa, saving much merchant tonnage. (A third objective, held by the British, was to commit US forces to a campaign in Italy in 1943, thereby preventing them from launching an early assault on northern France which the British judged premature.)
With Italy neutral, there can be no enemy to attack in Libya: and a conquest of French North Africa will yield little, since the Mediterranean is already available for merchant traffic, an attack on neutral Sicily and Italy with an Italian army and fleet as yet intact is difficult to justify, and an attack on southern France from Tunis or Algiers is logistically impossible. There were very good reasons for the naval approach from Tunis to France being a four-stage process: Husky, Avalanche, Shingle, Dragoon. So either Torch does not happen at all, or it is a small-scale effort leading nowhere.
Western Europe. There is a problem: in 1942/3, Roosevelt could see considerable advantages for himself, in domestic politics, if American armies could be demonstrated to be doing something significant against Germany. Torch and its successors did that. Without Torch, what could be done?
I can see two possibilities, neither advantageous. One is that, against the objections of Churchill and Brooke, the Americans get their way have a US/UK/Canada cross-Channel assault in 1943. There are serious problems. German armies have not been as much depleted on the Eastern front as they were by 1944 (and, less important but still significant) have not had losses in the Mediterranean and had to detach troops to defend Italy. Much of the support needed for the invasion (landing craft, artificial harbours) does not yet exist. The great aerial offensive that removed most of the Luftwaffe in early 1944 has not happened, and cannot be made to happen earlier. The Libyan campaigns have not forced the RAF to abandon their perennial preference for glamorous fighter combat and war-winning strategic bombing, and concentrate as per the Desert Air Force on close support for the army; a lesson taken to heart by the US, and decisive in Normandy. And perhaps most seriously, major US formations will be commanded, if that’s the word I’m looking for, by Lloyd Fredendall and Mark Clark.
Kasserine-sur-mer? Dieppe writ large? Very possibly. There might then be no repeat performance till 1945, and the war in Europe would end with Stalin’s armies much further into Europe. Would they stop at the Greek, Yugoslav, Italian borders?
The other possibility is that, an invasion of France in 1943 being ruled out, Admiral King in Washington is victorious in his struggle against his two main enemies, the US Army and the British Navy: and Roosevelt agrees to concentrate US efforts in the Pacific. The war in Europe, again, ends with the Red Army much further west. This also does not look good.
The Russian front. The conclusion above depends, of course, on the assumption that the German invasion of Russia is defeated more or less as it was. Would Italian neutrality affect that? Probably not in the long run, Russia is too big and there are too many Russians, but it would have some short-term effect. No Mediterranean campaign means another 200,000 or so German soldiers for the East, and there would be no need to commit ten German divisions to the defence of Italy: not a decisive number, not an insignificant one. Reinforcements of tanks and aircraft would be proportionately more significant. In particular, the crippling of the German air transport fleet in Crete and Tunis would not have happened. Perhaps the greatest difference would have been in motor transport. Rommel in North Africa was trying to do something without precedent: to fight a motorised war over long distances with no rail transport. Tripoli to Alamein is around 1,200 miles, to be covered by lorries on an indifferent road. Shorter hauls were possible from ports that had only a small and insufficient capacity, but even these covered several hundred miles. Consequently, the allocation of petrol and road transport to Rommel’s armies was out of all proportion to their numbers, and these were things the eastern armies were chronically short of.
It is sometimes said that the Balkan campaign of 1941 delayed Barbarossa, and without that the Germans would have had a few more weeks of relatively good weather, and might have taken Moscow. With no need to rescue the Italians from the Greeks, the Balkan campaign would have been unnecessary. The consensus, I think, is that the main factor preventing an earlier Barbarossa was the wet and late spring of 1941, which left major river valleys flooded and effectively impassible until the actual date of the attack.
So on balance, the effect in Europe of Italian neutrality might most probably be to delay the eventual advances of both Russian armies and the Western allies. The overall outcome would depend on which was delayed more.
Umbriel writes, meanwhile, ‘Your reasoning on the neutral Italy scenario seems sound to me as far as it goes. I would submit, though, that while Britain being at peace in the Med would have had little effect on Germany, the German forces thus freed up (the Afrikakorps, its Luftwaffe support, and Rommel himself) might well have proved significant in Russia. I think Barbarossa in 1941 was a sufficiently near-run thing that even those few extra resources might conceivably have made a decisive difference somewhere — perhaps letting Army Group North take Leningrad on the fly, or cutting off the Kiev pocket without diverting Guderian from Moscow.
A related question is the effect of Italian neutrality in the wider war on Mussolini’s interests in the Balkans, which he considered to properly be in Italy’s sphere of influence. Would Germany have found it necessary to garrison Ploesti against the Soviets, or could Italian troops have taken on that responsibility? Would Mussolini still have attacked Greece (he’d been bullying the Greeks for years, but jealousy of increasing German interference in the region was apparently one of the historical triggers for the invasion) and, if so, might Italy have ground on to at least a pyrrhic victory there with the additional resources available in the absence of other commitments.
And further, if the Balkans had remained primarily in the sphere of a neutral Italy, would Germany have found any intervention necessary there prior to Barbarossa? This could have freed up at least a few more German resources for employment in Russia (though I believe Yugoslavia and Greece were initially garrisoned primarily by Italy and Germany’s Balkan allies), would have kept the German paratrooper forces intact and Hitler confident in their abilities, and might even have let Barbarossa commence slightly earlier (though an unusually long spring rainy season in 1941 leaves that in doubt).
On the other hand, I think it’s entirely possible that Churchill might have invaded a neutral Italy or attempted some sort of intervention in the Balkans or Norway once Barbarossa was underway, especially given Britain’s more secure, less stretched, situation in this timeline (Gallipoli II, perhaps?). Whether such adventures would have offset German gains, or compounded them, is a question far enough out on an alternative limb to transcend counterfactual exercise and enter the realm of historical fantasy.
